Feedburner vs Email Marketing and Newsletters

Building a site or blog is only part of the formula that will help you make money online.  Another important aspect is maintaining contact with your visitors.  If a reader arrives at your site because of an organic search, or because a friend referred them, you need a way to maintain your ties to them.  To do this, you need to send them regular updates that will remind them that your site or blog exists.

How do you do this?   There are two basic ways you can do this: RSS (real simple syndication) feed and email newsletters. There are pros and cons of each, so you need to determine what your needs are before making your final decision.  Here’s a simple breakdown of the pros and cons, as I see it:

RSS feed pros:

RSS feeds require no extra work on your part.  You just put a link on your site, enabling readers to subscribe to your feed, and –Voila!– you have yourself a subscribed reader.  Now, each time you write a new blog post, your reader will be able to read it.     Your reader also has the benefit of being able to choose the method he/she will receive and read your feed:  feed reader or email.  The main perks of using RSS: it’s free, and your readers will always know when you’ve written a new entry.

RSS feed cons:

With RSS feed, you don’t have access to your readers’ information, and therefore aren’t able to do backups of your subscription data base.    With RSS, you’re unable to run split tests (sending different emails to different members), and unable to contact them in any way other than with blog posts.

Email marketing newsletters pros:

Most email marketing newsletter companies have more capabilites than RSS feeds.  You can run tests, alter the look and layout, and include banner ads in your outgoing newsletters.  You also have more control, in that you can send out newsletters that are independent of and not reflected on the site itself.  This means you can entice readers to subscribe by promising content that’s not included on the site.

Email marketing cons:

Coming up with content for a blog and a newsletter might be daunting for some.  Unlike RSS feeds, email marketing is not free.  Most sites charge a monthly fee to manage your email membership lists.

A Weber has graciously offered to allow my readers to take a free test drive of their email marketing services.  If you’re interested in learning how A Weber can help with your email marketing strategies, fill out their info box below: